News and updates on Daedalus PSP and various notes on emulator development.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

R13 close, honestly!

Apologies again for the lack of updates. I know people get nervous when I don't update regularly, but I don't like to post when I have nothing new or exciting to talk about.

I'm very close to releasing R13, I've just been struggling to find the time to add the final finishing touches to the savestate support. I've found it hard to get into a regular working pattern since moving, so what should have been a 1 week job has ended up taking a month. Bioshock and Halo 3 haven't helped either.

Savestates are working very well. The current implementation provides 10 slots which are shared across all roms. You can save to any slot at any time from an option on the Pause menu, or choose to reload a previous savestate. In this way it works just like QuickSave/QuickLoad found in various PC games (I'm tempted to add a special slot for this to the top level of the Pause menu).

I use zlib to compress the savestates, so an 8MiB savestate compresses down to 1MiB (or even smaller if you're running games which don't use the Expansion Pak).

There are just a couple of things I need to finish off now before I can release. Firstly I need to check if the savestate you're loading is for a different rom than is currently loaded. If this is the case I need to scan through your available roms looking for the correct one, and load it. To make this efficient I need to get the RomDB which I use for the PC build working on the PSP.

The second thing I need to do is come up with a decent way of linking some metadata to the savestate so I can show this in the UI. Just simple stuff like the full name of the rom, time the savestate was created and the total time spent playing when it was created. I figure without this information it'll be quite difficult to figure out what it stored in each savestate slot. The alternative is to add a text entry system to the UI so you can name each savestate, but I think this will just delay things even more.

In summary R13 is really close and I've not forgotten about it. Just a few more things to sort out and it'll be ready for release.

Thats great news. I noticed in your other posts that R13 will be reasnably faster than R12. I was just wondering how much faster will it be and will it be able to run super mario 64 at full speed without sound? Because it is very close in R12.Thanks and keep up the great work.

You've lately talked about the new implementation of "savestate", but before that, you made some optimizations that gave you a series of speedups.So, besides the savestate, how much faster is R13 from R12? And also, what is your next goal to focus on? Sound? Speed? Compatibility?

First I'd like to say that I love this project your doing - your work is very much appreciated and enjoyed, Thanks you are da man! Second I'd like to say that this is also very much worth the wait and will always be highly anticipated by the gaming communities - to have a working N64 Emulator on the PSP is incredible, I am hoping for a much needed speed increase so roms can be tested and/or played at a normal speed level (No disrespect in that statement, just hoping.) I would use this emulator for hours and hours because I have a lot of favorite N64 games that I love to play still, even after all these years. Anyways I do thank you for your great work, I will always be a huge fan of yours!! Later - Alan

THanks for all that you have already done for all us retro gamers. Looking back at some of the different forum posts over the web about some of your earlier builds, since then you have already achieved so much that everyone said was impossible on the psp due to hardware limitations. Keep on proving em wrong.

Is that all there is on the R13 so far or have you forgotten to post Speed Dynaric, ect. and whatabout the slim will that get an update or is it gonna be one update until you get a slim? I cant wait for this release cause it looks like you worked on this one for a long period of time. Nice Jod on Savestates they really become useful at times. Oh and what about the Turok Series will you ever get to them in your next update or even R15? I was wondering because they really shouldnt be hard to fix.

Nice, I was wondering where you had gone to xD. Actually, you do deserve a break, what you do isn't easy stuff. I can't wait for R13, hopefully zelda has those texture issues fixed and starcraft64(loads at least), I myself code but I am sure I am nowhere near your level but I might go ahead and try and get those two games to work if they don't.

First: Thank you for your hard work. We're really looking forward to see R13 as soon as possible.

Second: May I suggest you something rather stupid but very simple? Use a plain text file to store metadata and a savegame file both named just like the ROM.Example.ROM: ROMS/supersmashb.bin SAVE 1: SAVES/supersmashb_1.savMETA 1: SAVES/supersmashb_1.metSAVE 2: SAVES/supersmashb_2.savMETA 2: SAVES/supersmashb_2.met

So when you load the rom, you scan the SAVE directory for savestates, and then load the metadata MET files to show on the save list.

This may sound just lame, but is easier than creating your own savegame format and embedding the metadata in it.